← The Read Well Podcast
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Eddie Hood
Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, everybody. Welcome to my reading room. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm the host of the Read well podcast. I just got a really great question from Rob Teal that I wanted to talk to you about today as a quick chat to get the new year started off right. So Rob emailed me and he asked how many books I read at a time and do I deep dive into them all? Because I'm always talking about reading slowly, taking notes and applying the ideas. And he then asks, are you annotating and taking notes in all of them or just purely for a story to enjoy? And so a couple of things here. I'm first going to give you an answer that you probably won't like, and then I'll give you an answer that hopefully you will like. So stick around to the end. And also, if you conversation helpful and you like these more informal chats rather than the bigger sort of produced conversations I put out with edited videos and stuff, give the. Give the video a. Like, I'd appreciate that. And leave me a comment. Let me know what you think about reading strategies and how you approach books. So I had a conversation on my podcast in the middle of last year with an author, Junot Diaz. Let me grab his book. It's right here, the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde. He wrote several other books. He's a really strong writer. His voice is just so strong. It's so impactful. This book will actually sort of knock your socks off if you read it because the prose is just so gritty. And so I have a friend who's a trucker and he read it and he said it actually made him blush. That's how gritty this prose is. But anyway, in the conversation, Junot Diaz mentioned that for him, reading is something that is personal. There is no predefined or prescribed answer. Now, this is the part that you're not going to like, and that's okay. I'll give you a predefined, prescribed answer in a minute. It. But I liked what Juno said. He said, you know what, there are different times and different seasons in our lives, and there are really points where we can, we can afford to read more and points where we really can't because there's just so much going on. And I think that's okay. I think it's okay to know yourself well enough to really know when to sort of put on the gas and when to pull back as a reader. Reading is a skill. It's not something that is sort of like, so, for example, going to the gym every day, that's something that you do on a daily basis where I just got to show up. I got to spend an hour there doing bench press and walking on a treadmill, and then I'm done. Reading is a relationship where your mental sort of abilities change and ebb and flow. I just got done reading a really great book by Cal Newport. It's called Deep Work. It's actually my second time I've read it. And in that he talks about how our ability to focus and to think and do deep work is actually a limited resource and how we don't have just unlimited amounts of focus. And we need to acknowledge that. Right? We need to know that we. We only have so much brain power to give. Which is why at the end of the day, you feel like mush. Well, at least I feel like mush. So if we go back to Junot Diaz's comment, you need to know yourself before you answer this question. And that's the skill I want to point out today. And then I'll get into the pre described amount. What I try to accomplish, but what I'm trying to get better at, first of all for myself is listening to myself and paying attention to how I'm doing mentally, how I'm doing emotionally, how I'm doing physically, because allows me to sort of know when to turn up the speed on the reading. There's a book I'm reading right now called how to Live a Life of Montana. This is a sort of a biography on the essayist Michel de Montaigne. He lived in the 1500s in France. In fact, I like this book so much that I'm going to add it to my bookstore at Edgewater in the coming months. So watch out for that. Anyway, there's an essay in here on his approach to reading, and I thought you might find this interesting. So he's talking about how he approached books because he was an avid reader. He collected a large volume or a large library in his home and really enjoyed that. But he said the section says his rule in reading remained the one he had learned from Ovid, Pursue pleasure. It goes on to say, if I encounter difficulties in reading, he wrote, I do not gnaw my nails over them. I leave them there. I do nothing without gaiety. So that's the first thing I want to point out, is to read for pleasure. Now that doesn't mean just read sort of fun fictional work. Although that's great. You might find pleasure in reading biographies of people like Michel de Montaigne. I thoroughly enjoy this book. I'm having a really hard time putting it down, but for some of you, that's not going to be the case. Right? You need to know your own tastes. You need to know what sort of gets your engine going. And you need to get really good at listening to that curiosity. So that's the, that's the first part of our answer today. You have a limited capacity of mental energy you can give to reading each day and you have a curiosity that you need to follow. So capacity and curiosity are the first sort of response I want to give you today to how many books you should be reading and what you should be reading. So now for me, on a daily basis, I try to follow a certain formula a little bit because I do like structure. Now I lead up a book club where we meet every Tuesday night and we talk about really great books and we have a sort of a year schedule built out. Right now we're reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, which is an incredibly beautiful book by the way. You should join us at book club if you've never thought about doing that and you're looking for a group to have great conversations with. But anyway, I've always got a book for book club going because I am sort of the group leader there, which means I have to keep up on that reading and that's actually a really nice blessing. So I've always got a book from book club going and sometimes that's fiction, sometimes that's nonfiction. And I have to take notes on those books thoroughly because I am the one presenting the information every Tuesday night online. So I don't have the freedom of just casually reading those books. I really need to take detailed notes otherwise they're going to be really boring meetings. So right now, again, Anna Karenina. And yeah, I take notes on both fictional works and nonfictional works. But here's the thing. Not all books are worthy. That's the wrong word, but worthy of taking notes. They're just not interesting enough or there's nothing to take notes on. Like Harry Potter, for example. I love Harry Potter, but I'm not going to take notes on Harry Potter. I'm just going to. I'm just going to go to Hogwarts. I'm Just going to enjoy the magic and be a kid and do my thing. Right. I don't, I don't have any reason to do that. But my mantra, read slowly, take notes and apply the idea. I do read every book slowly. So when I read Harry Potter, I absolutely read slowly. I revel in those words and I enjoy them, but I don't see a need to take notes. Right. So hopefully that answers that. So in my own personal life, yeah, I have a book going for book club and then I try to do what Montana does, which is to really follow my interests, my curiosity. And if I'm not finding anything of interest in a book, I don't continue reading it. So I have a rule of thumb where I give every book that I think will be interesting 50 pages. It's just a blank 50 pages. And I let the author develop his or her arguments, the story, the plot, the whatever. And at 50 pages I make a decision. Am I still curious about this work? Is it gripping me? Is it motivating me? Am I excited? Am I taking notes? Or am I just getting through this thing? If I'm just getting through it, then I shut that book and I just go to the next book that I feel curious about. And I don't feel bad about that. I don't ever think like, oh no, I failed. I'm not a good reader. I somehow didn't finish a book. My self, my self worth is not tied to completing books. My self worth is tied to choosing books that interest me and continuing to feed that curiosity. Once I find a book that passes the 50 page mark, I stick with it. Right. It's got me. And so I always have a non fiction book. I try to, that I'm reading because I like to learn sort of technical things. It's just where my interests lie. I love philosophy. So this, this whole shelf, these are my, my books on philosophy and essayists and, and those kinds of things. This is where I love to spend most of my, my reading time. So I always have one of those books going and I, I'm almost always taking notes on nonfiction books. If I'm in those, they're written to be educational. And so I show up as a student for those books. I show up ready to absorb something from a master teacher. And I really want to make that time worthwhile. I mean, just think about it, right? If one of these authors came to your home at night and for dinner and just spent three hours with you teaching you the most incredible stuff, you would probably want to take out a notepad and write some notes down or at the very least hit record on your iPhone and record the things that they're saying. Now I always read my nonfiction first thing in the morning because for me that's when the coffee is hot and the brain is working. I am not yet plagued by email and stress and the chaos of the day. I like to wake up early. In fact, I posted my morning routine video a while back. But yeah, I like to read nonfiction first thing just to sort of get in student mode, in learning mode. That puts me in sort of control of my self education, right? I feel like I am responsible for my own education. Nobody else is responsible for that. I do that for a few hours. I use my little timer here on my desk. This is a 30 minute timer. I love this thing. I just flip it and it starts tracking the time. And I try to get at least four flips of that. So about two hours in the morning if I can. Sometimes three, depending on how busy my, my day is. And then at night, I love to have a fictional book that is just meant to like take me away, right? I've had a long day. I, I want to go somewhere interesting. I want to meet interesting people, I want to try interesting things. And so I, I prefer to have a fictional book where I don't feel compelled to take notes in. If I do, that fictional book gets shifted to the morning time where I'm again at my desk and I'm taking notes. I try to make my fictional books at night just for pleasure. So this is a good example here. This is Fredrik Backman's work, Beartown. We read this in book club. I talk about this on my show all the time. There's actually three books in this series but didn't take a single note in these books. But they're beautiful, they're fun, they're engaging. They just sort of swept me away to this little town where people love hockey more than life. I don't even like hockey, but I love these books. So that's a, that's an example. So yeah, for me it sounds like I typically have three books going. I have the nonfiction for the morning study, I have the fiction for the evening enjoyment. And then I have my book club book, whatever's happening at the time. But like Junot Diaz said to come back full circle, I have to listen to myself, right? There are times in my life where I have more time available to me than not. And I might poke around with a few other books, but if I get past three, I tend to start losing the thread of the books that I'm in. I know some people that can read 5, 6, 7, 10 books at a time and I just. I don't know how you could possibly do that. My brain just doesn't work that way, so I think three is probably my max. I hope that helps. That was a great question, and if you have any other questions for me, feel free to email me. Eddie thereadwellpodcast.com that's Eddie D D Y thereeedwellpodcast.com and I will be honored to chat with you, have a cup of coffee, and answer your questions. So until next time. As always, remember to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thanks everyone. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to Read well. How to. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.